means do not permit me to bestow such princely presents. I of course deplore the inability I confess to." This was clever of the Baron, and the ladies' gallery was evidently appeased by an admission which was significantly an act of homage. The judge here rather fenced with the witness for some minutes, inasmuch as he permitted a change to be introduced in the written promise of repayment, and the date altered from the 20th to the 30th of April; such a concession seeming to imply the existence of that "sympathy" to which the court attached much meaning. The General admitted to having made the lady presents-a bracelet on her birthday, and suchlike trifling souvenirs. A somewhat curious psychological examination here ensued as to how far the General's generosity was influenced by the before-mentioned sympathy, or by the production of the papers that implied Madame la Garde's perfect solvency and respectability. In this discussion the judge displayed a very palpable desire to show the court how, judge as he was, and surrounded by all the emblems of incorruptible justice, a heart susceptible of human emotions, and even of some frailties, had once beat beneath that black robe, and that it was in a profound knowledge of certain effects that he instituted that search after "sympathy." The deference of the bar to the deeper acquaintance of the bench with female frailty was here shown with a delicacy not to be equalled; and in the little comedy that followed, the Field-Marshal-Lieutenant played a most interesting part. The consciousness-not to be disputed that he had fallen amongst thieves, could not eradicate the memory of a very charming acquaintance; and a lurking feeling of interest for the female prisoner tinctured every avowal that he was forced to make to her disadvantage. Garnuchot was a hardened sinner, and there was no sympathy felt by any one for a fellow whose most predominant expression in court was utter weariness at the long-winded nature of the evidence, and the legal exactitude employed to prove some fact which, even to save time, he was quite ready to concede on his own part. The utter shamelessness of the man, in his frequent references to ladies-wives or daughters of his creditors—completely alienated from him all the sympathy of that fair part of the auditory present in court. The defendant's advocate resisted with no small energy and spirit the irrelevant details which the judge continued to pour forth on every occasion of the former lives and adventures of the prisoners; and as these were, after all, mere newspaper scandals, or passing paragraphs from the journals of watering-places, totally out of the realm of "evidence"-as we understand evidence-it was strange to see the insistence with which the court adhered to a mode of attack so manifestly unfair and unsupported. The evidence closed, the Crown prosecutor opened his speech, most characteristically showing how, on physiological grounds, these two people should have come together and agree to cheat the world in company. - As a little bit of moral philosophy adapted to the meridian of the police court, the speech was a gem; and when he came to Heidelberg and the reconciliation, - when he came to show how Madame forgot all his transgression, his guilt at Frankfort, his shame and his sentence, and rushed back, with the force of a love not to be restrained, into all her former affection-nothing but a language accustomed to deal with inscrutable sympathies and untraceable impulses could have sustained him. With consummate subtlety he showed that two persons impelled forcibly towards each other by some mystic and inscrutable sympathy, whose hearts beat with such responsive force, and whose two natures blended so inseparably together, were, in fact, urged by a force stronger than their own to commit acts in unison, which the colder judgment of mankind would pronounce criminal,-and in all this he seemed actually their apologist; and it was only after showing what a natural thing it is for two people who love each other to agree to cheat somebody else, and that nothing can be more logical than for souls steeped in pure affection to live by fraud, falsehood, or forgery, that he positively astounded the audience by asking the court to sentence the prisoners, the man to four, and the lady to two years' imprisonment, with hard labour and other concomitant severities. The defence was no less strange. It opened with a humoristic satire on the society of the most exclusive city of Europe-Vienna-which had opened its doors so freely to two unknown and unintroduced strangers; and went on to show how people of moderate fortune, and, till then, moderate ambition, had been seduced by the temptations of luxury and extravagance into modes of life that, to use the harshest word, were only thoughtless. Nor was there much self-deception needed to persuade Madame la Garde that she was only living as she had a right to live. What was there in her surroundings other than she had known from childhood? Her unhappy marriage, her still more miserable love for an adventurer, he touched on with infinite tact and delicacy, for he was the lady's advocate, and not concerned for Garnuchot. As for her frequent change of name, the advocate assured the court that, being of English birth, this meant less than nothing; that there was no practice more common amongst Englishmen than to change their names at any or every moment of their lives. NEW BOOKS. Ir has become one of the common fictions of the world to pretend that in autumn everybody is absent from home, and keeping holiday. Everybody! meaning, perhaps, one in a hundred thousand or so of the inhabitants of this earth-yet enough, to our contracted eyesight and imagination, to represent the race. It is suitable, therefore, though melancholy, at such a time, with the certain knowledge that a great many persons are enjoying what we can only read about, to surround ourselves with some of the crowd of volumes about the Alps which have recently poured upon us. Cold comfort! but seasonable, as old-fashioned folks still say when their fingers are pinched and their noses blue with winter frosts. A course of Whymper,* Tyndall, and Stephen is not, perhaps, so exhilarating as actual sight of the Oberland or the snowy peaks of Savoy, but still it is better than no Alps at all. And while our authors drag us after them up flinty heights and over incipient avalanches, there will be moments in which we will look round our dull chamber walls with an ache and shiver of thankfulness, and praise all our gods that our limbs are entire, our fingers and toes unfrostbitten, our faces unscarified. Looking out from our "loopholes of retreat," as Cowper did upon the stormy world outside, we can even see Mr Whymper falling into space down that ice-slope, which is figured in his charming narrative, with a sympathetic giddiness which is not painful-which, in short, is absolutely pleasant. But it would not be pleasant at first hand. There is, however, one slight drawback to this consolatoriness of our Alpine books; one which we regard with a certain rueful amusement in our quiet. It is that our friends evidently consider our absence from these happy climbingfields, our imprisonment at home, and incapacity for following them in the pranks which they play between earth and heaven, as our own fault. "Old men, women, and cripples," Mr Leslie Stephen is not ashamed to call us-opprobrious epithets, which make our exile from the snow still harder to bear. What have we done that we should be branded as "old men, women, and cripples," because we can't get up the Matterhorn-because, indeed, we can't get within a thousand miles of it, but only worship afar off the celestial outline presented to us in a book? This is to insult misfortune. Such names may, indeed, be justly applied to those idiots, or worse than idiots, who endeavour to throw paltry aspersions upon the demigods of the Alpine Club; but we who are ready to sit at the feet of those heroes, what have we done to merit such wholesale contempt ? We repeat, it is with a rueful smile that we hear ourselves thus assailed. As if we could help it! As if we, too, had heaven smiled upon the desire, would not have been gazing upon the snow of the Jungfrau, or hearing the cataracts thunder from the steeps! When we turn instead into the recess of this big window and look down upon the quadrangle of a deserted college, on ivied walls which shroud nothing but sparrows, and trees which wave desolate in * Scrambles among the Alps, by Edward Whymper; The Playground of Europe, by Leslie Stephen; Hours of Exercise in the Alps, by Professor Tyndall. a breeze as cold as that which sweeps of unspoken feeling that penetrates the Grands Mulets, does Mr Stephen him like an arrow-half delight, think our virtuous and patient soul half pain. It is like a sudden inis in a fit state to be aggravated troduction to beings grander than by taunts? Old men, women, and humanity,-majestic things which cripples! Just heavens! because speak but afford no answer, which our balance at our banker's is insuf- give but cannot receive—too vast, ficient to carry us to Switzerland, too solemn, too much rapt in heais this the treatment, are these the ven-communion, to listen to earthly insulting titles, which we are to be noises. When we approach them compelled to bear? nearer, with how many voices do they speak to us!-sometimes wildly in wind and storm; sometimes musically, grandly, with a voice of With this remonstrance, however, by the way, let us return to our subject. There is, as no one in these days is likely to deny, an attraction about the snowy mountains which surpasses every other attraction of scenery. It was not so, it is true, in former days; but there is no doubt that a prevailing consciousness of danger must, to all except a very few adventurous souls, blunt the perception of beauty to a wonderful extent; and this must have been always present to the tourist of the eighteenth century. The sea is as grand in storm as anything can be; but how very few of us enjoy its majesty at such a moment! To-day, when even the Alpine climber (with what truth we may discuss hereafter) declares his perilous amusement as safe as London streets, we approach the mountain under altogether different auspices, and are prepared for beauty, not for danger. And when the traveller, weary with the dust, the heat, the ennui, and monotony of a long journey, lifts up his eyes, should it be only from the terrace at Neuchatel, or the deck of the steamer on Lake Leman, and suddenly sees the sun light up that glorious silent line, half in the mists, half floating in the blue above-great, serious, lofty Presences, looking down in a solemn abstraction, like calm gods unmoved by our earthly levities, upon the trifling vicissitudes below-not all the babble of tourists, not all the fuss and folly of couriers and guide-books, can blunt the thrill 66 many waters"-that sound which has been selected as the most fit emblem of the voice of God; and sometimes with that hush of profoundest silence, which stills the listener, and gives him an ineffable, indescribable consolation. No one who has ever lived face to face, even through the medium of the commonest inn window, with, for example, that majestic maiden the Jungfrau -who has seen her whiteness flush with the morning and the evening lights, and blanch into the solemn pallor of the moon-can ever forget that great companion to whom his thoughts addressed themselves as by some magical compulsion, who made herself the centre of life, the mysterious white soul of the silent awestricken universe around. though we cannot but think that there is something in the position of the Jungfrau, in the grouping of the foreground, in the grand fulness of her spotless slopes, and perhaps even in her name, which has a special influence upon the beholder, it is the same more or less with every sovereign mountain. Whoever the other inhabitants may be, that is the one inhabitant to whom the eye first turns. Our thoughts go like the winds to breathe about the head which shines so high above us. We seek it among the mists, we feel it even when the clouds have combined to shroud the wonderful And presence: our mountain becomes handsomest, and most attractive. the centre of our world. This is the case even with the ordinary traveller. We do not venture to speak, because we are not qualified to judge, of the sentiments of those curious hordes, nomadic for the nonce, who are to be met in Switzerland-heaven knows whyby the score, either under the angelic guardianship of Mr Cook, or in their own terrible guidance. They like it, we presume, or they would not do it; though what their object can be, it would be very hard to say. They are, we suppose, an instance of the appalling effects of undue accumulation of money, and that slavish obedience to the customs of the classes who "set the fashion," which is one of the horrors of civilisation. But, after all, it is doubt ful how far the traveller who starts from a higher level has any right to blaspheme in respect to the Cockney tourist. A man may drop his h's and yet be able to appreciate fine scenery; and he may make himself intensely disagreeable in an inn without being of necessity unworthy to be made happier and better (if he can) by the sight of a glacier or an aiguille. And then with the same measure as we mete to the Cook's excursionists, so shall it be meted to all the rest of us by the Alpine Club. This is the most forcible argument for charity that we are aware of. In such a case the Cockney may chuckle as we can suppose a Dissenter chuckling, who, after having been pronounced out of the pale of covenanted mercies by an Anglican divine, beholds that Anglican as contemptuously handled by the first snuffstained curé who comes in his reverence's way. The three books which come to us together, and which we propose to discuss in common, have each their different characteristics. Mr Whymper's work is the biggest, the Its pictures alone are enough to make the fortune of any volume; and the narrative has unfortunately an interest deeper than anything which can spring from mere scenery, though the noblest and grandest. It culminates in a tragedy—one of the saddest of modern times; and though the chief hero-the teller of the tale-survives, and was in his own person victorious over all his difficulties, yet this wild romance of the Matterhorn can never be dissociated from the graves which lie low beneath its terrible peak; and which have, we hope, damped the enthusiasm of all afterinvaders of its solitude. The story thus tragically wound up has at the same time a certain character of unity and completeness in itself which transcends the simple sketches of successful ascents, now of one mountain, now of another, which are to be found in the companion books. Mr Whymper's tale is the tale of a great persistent, often interrupted, but finally victorious, effort. Other peaks jostle each other in more discursive narratives, but here there is one central object, as distinct as that which causes any other invasion of territory or great siege. He proposed to himself to take the Matterhorn just as Bismark proposed to take Paris. But it is the picturesque warfare of old, the rush of personal valour and daring, the combinations planned by one wary brain, and executed by one set of muscular sinews, and not the blank immensity of modern fighting, which he brings before us. Mr Whymper goes forth like a knight of old with his axe and his rope. You have only to add a dragon-devastator of the surrounding valleys, or an enchanted princess frozen up in some chill magician's castle, to make the story into a fit subject for romance. The Red Cross Knight himself |